A curious variation on the road movie from New Zealand. It is basically a two-hander. One character we first see in his car, headbanging to bad indie. The other has just been thrown out of a car. We soon find out why. Wherever she's going, she's not going very far, because she's rude and obnoxious, with a tendency to light up without asking. He offers her a lift.
What follows is the pair's growing, though disharmonious relationship. A timid man (she calls him a 'yuppie'), who really doesn't like music too loud, he is goaded by her into being a 'real' man, brutal, and driving very fast, although he doesn't do these very well. She's a real cow, but the great thing about these performances is the insecurities subtly revealed behind the facades the characters present.
So, although the film is ostensibly a 'wry' (yawn) look at gender relations in contemporary New Zealand, its more resonant ramifications concern loneliness and the difficulties of communication in these times. Despite the overwhelming urbanity of modern cinema, this is a film set in a vast bleak landscape, in pitch dark. The car scenes are highly stylised, quite clearly nothing is moving.
This must be deliberate, because, whatever problems arose in Hitchcock's day, there is no difficulty in this kind of filming now. The car is their oasis in this vast desert, a suspension from reality, a priveleged space. These are two lost souls adrift in the night. Although much of it is violent and unpleasant, there is at least communication, and gradually a kind of truce emerges. This makes the strange ending, at dawn, symbolic, enigmatic, and satisfying in an apparent closure concealing many loose ends.
Many New Zealand films - especially ONCE WERE WARRIORS - tend to be dour, humorless and defeatist. Maybe this film's relative optimism stems from its concentration on probably middle-class, certainly white people at the expense of the Maoris, where optimism, relative or otherwise, isn't much of an option, leaving another black hole in a fairly entertaining short.
